There is no predicting a year of music or the tastes of record buyers, let alone the mind of a music critic.

Sure, as Courtney Barnett figured in 2014's best albums, with a compilation of her first EPs that couldn't count as a debut album but was too good to leave out, you might have anticipated she would be back in 2015. But would you have predicted that return to be one of the top three albums of the year, alongside a one-time drummer in a layered-vocal folk-rock group and a Los Angeles rapper-soul man who talked love, lust and resistance to a police state in equal measure, and those three keeping company with a triple-disc album of sometimes wild, always brilliant jazz? Hell no.

Album of the Year is Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.

This before you consider that no crystal ball would have seen Daniel Johns emerging from a post-Silverchair cocoon as a lithe and sexy rhythm and blues man, or Blur and Sleater-Kinney reforming and making albums that were anything but a contractual obligation, or, and this may be the most shocking of all, that Carly Rae Jepsen and Justin Bieber would transcend pop-trash name calling and make fine, hook-filled records.

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A cabal of 14 critics was polled, requiring only a little bit of coercion and the promise of buttered scones, for the final judgment.

The spread of nominations was ridiculously wide, from Malian rock and electro pop to dark-art rock, from slinky R&B to country made by a tall New Zealander living in Melbourne and sounding as if he comes from Arkansas. And yes, there was Tame Impala and Grimes.

From this emerged four clear frontrunners: the aforementioned Ms Barnett with Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit, Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear​, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and Kamasi Washington's appropriately named The Epic.

It would take something special to beat The Epic, a triple album about which Sean Rabin said "In both ambition and accomplishment, [Washington proved] that the only way to dream was to dream big, and in doing so he made a record for a lifetime."

It would require genius, maybe, to beat Barnett, who showed, I wrote, "a willingness to be raw, to be tender, to be gritty and garagey and then quite soulful (without making anything like soul music), to create a slow-burn furnace that rages hard in its last minutes and to be catchy as all get out".

No mere regular record could top Father John Misty's The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment, where, as reviewer Paul Smith said, "personal pain never sounded so glorious".

So it took a countback to separate them. It might take another year to really appreciate them. Your time starts now.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR

To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

It arrived without notice but promptly ended top of the charts in Australia, the US and Britain. It was the Compton, Los Angeles, musician's third album and maybe his masterpiece.

Craig Mathieson called it "a hall of mirrors where ambition cuts through contrary instincts", with 27-year-old Lamar's rapping "having a virtuosic ease [that], confronts his acclaim, wearing his 'survivor's guilt', while turning expectations into excoriating self-analysis".

Tim Byron described an album that was "both weird and weirdly accessible; both intensely personal and a crowd pleaser; and both a lot of fun and heavy with political protest (witness the footage of protesters in Chicago chanting Lamar's Alright to the police)". It sounded like 2015.